A business network may include large numbers of storage resources, such as multiple disk arrays, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, and the like. As a result, a large data center may have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of disk drives. In many data centers, the physical disk drives are assigned to groups of drives that are further grouped into pools of storage. Virtual disk drives may then be assigned to the pools of storage. The virtual drives act as physical drives to host computers, which generally not have to have an actual map of the physical configuration of the storage arrays.
However, managing the storage resources has become a critical activity. To configure and to define the correct configuration is a complex activity that is made more difficult by the different storage characteristics of the storage resources, such as redundancy level, availability time and performance. When combined with the access speed and performance needed by the host computers, the problem becomes even more difficult. Up to 80% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a storage array may be spent on configuration and management activities.